The One Person I Am Not Kind To

You are a gentle man. Ask anybody.

Your children know it. When one of them breaks something, you crouch down and you keep your voice level and you say the thing that a frightened child needs to hear, and you mean it, and it costs you nothing because it is who you are. When your wife is at the end of a hard week you do not lecture her about the week. When somebody at work makes a mistake that lands on you, you find the sentence that lets them keep their dignity.

And then you pass the mirror in the hall on your way to bed, and something else entirely comes out of you.

Not out loud. It never has to be out loud. It is fast and it is fluent and it has been running for so many years that it does not feel like speech, it feels like observation. Two words, maybe. A tone. And it lands on you the way a stranger's contempt would land on your son, and you would put yourself between your son and that stranger without thinking twice.

Let me say the plain thing first, because it belongs first. You have not been indifferent to this. You have been carrying it for a very long time and you have tried to deal with it more than once, and you have gotten up and gone on being kind to everybody else in the house every single time. That is not weakness. Nobody builds a lifetime of gentleness toward other people by accident.

So I am not going to ask you to be nicer to yourself. That phrase has never once helped a man and it usually just adds a second failure on top of the first.

What I want to do is smaller. I want to show you a verse you have read a hundred times and ask who it includes.

The exemption you made without noticing

Somewhere along the way an exemption got written, and nobody signed it and nobody remembers filing it.

The rule in your house is that people are handled gently. That rule is real. You enforce it on other people's behalf and you would enforce it against yourself in a second if you caught yourself breaking it with anybody else. And then there is one name on the list that the rule does not cover, and the strange thing is that you are not even conscious of the exemption. It does not feel like an exception to a rule. It feels like accuracy.

You are inside your own instruction, and the Holy Spirit has never once read that verse with your name left off it. Ephesians 4:32 says be kind one to another, tenderhearted, which is a sentence with no exempt name anywhere in it, and the exemption in your house was never signed by God.

Here is why the exemption feels like accuracy rather than cruelty. Kindness toward another person is generous. Kindness toward yourself feels like a claim. It feels like arguing for a verdict you have not earned, and a man who has spent his life being honest is not going to start lying to himself now.

You are not being asked to overstate anything, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates kindness from flattery in a man who has spent decades confusing them. The written word says be kind and tenderhearted, forgiving one another, which is not a sentence about accuracy at all, and no honest man has ever once had to be cruel in order to stay honest.

Who Paul is talking to

The verse is short and it is one of the most quoted lines in the letter.

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. (Ephesians 4:32, King James Version)

Kind. Tenderhearted. Forgiving. And then the measure, which is the part that does the work: as God has forgiven you.

Paul does not say be kind to the extent that people deserve it. He gives the standard, and the standard is the way God has already dealt with the person reading. Which means the kindness he is describing is not calibrated to merit at all. It is calibrated to what has already been received.

You have been given the measure already, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a standard like that stop being an instruction and start being a supply. Ephesians 4 sets the measure at what God has already done for you rather than at what anybody has earned, and it has never once been set by what a man deserves.

And then ask the question that nobody asks about this verse. One another. Does the man saying it count as one of the another? Every other command in the chapter about how people are handled applies inside the room, to whoever is in it. You are in the room. You are in the hall at midnight and there is a person there.

You were always in the room, and the Spirit of God is the one who puts a man inside his own commandment. Ephesians 4:32 says be kind one to another, tenderhearted, with nobody standing outside the sentence, and there has never once been a person in that hallway who did not qualify.

What that voice is actually for

Now the part I came to say.

That voice is not truth-telling. It has convinced you it is, because it is quick and because it says the harsh thing, and harsh things sound like honesty. But watch what it actually accomplishes. It does not correct anything. It has never once produced a change in you. It arrives, it lands, and it leaves, and the only thing it reliably does is get there before somebody else can.

That is what it is for. It is a guard. Say the worst thing first and nobody can wound you with it, and you have been running that defense for so long that you mistake the guard for a conscience.

You have never once been convicted by contempt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can tell a man the difference between conviction and a sneer. Ephesians 4 says the measure is how God has dealt with you, which is a measure with no contempt anywhere in it, and God has not spoken to you in that voice a single time in your life.

Conviction moves toward you and it comes with a door. Contempt moves at you and it comes with a verdict. You already know how God speaks, because you have heard Him: it is the same voice you use with your children when they have broken something, level and close and unhurried.

You are spoken to the way you speak to your own son, and the voice in that hallway has never once been the one God uses. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that recognizable rather than merely believable, and the written word sets the standard at even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.